Comprehending bar charts

One of the most iconic charts is the bar chart. Everyone has seen one and they are sometimes taken to symbolize the general concept of a chart. What you may not know is that there are actually several different kinds of bar charts that are used for different situations. Here are a few of the most common ones.

Bar charts

The classic bar chart is the simplest form of bar chart, but also one of the most useful. Bar charts are used to compare one quantitative variable to a qualitative variable. In other words, you are looking at a number that is broken down into categories. We can see what this looks like in Figure 13.3:

Figure 13.3 – Bar chart

Each bar represents a group, and the size of the bar represents the number value for that group. This is the bread and butter of data visualizations and is used in pretty much every field.

Stacked charts

Stacked bar charts are a little more complicated. Here, you are looking...